David Sacks, former CEO of Yammer sits in his office, Monday February 13, 2012, in San Francisco, Calif. Yammer is a social network for businesses.

David Sacks, former CEO of Yammer sits in his office, Monday February 13, 2012, in San Francisco, Calif. Yammer is a social network for businesses.

Photo: Lacy Atkins, The Chronicle

Image 2 of 3

David Sacks, former COO for PayPal, and producer of the movie, "Thank you for smoking, " is now founder CEO of Yammer, based in San Francisco, a social network for businesses, Friday July 1, 2011.

David Sacks, former COO for PayPal, and producer of the movie, "Thank you for smoking, " is now founder CEO of Yammer, based in San Francisco, a social network for businesses, Friday July 1, 2011.

Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle

Image 3 of 3

Meet the Boss: David Sacks, CEO of Yammer

1 / 3

Back to Gallery

After producing the Golden Globe-nominated satirical comedy "Thank You for Smoking" in 2005, David Sacks was content to return to his job as a tech entrepreneur.

"We created PayPal in three years, and we created a movie in three years," said Sacks, who was chief operating officer when the online payment service was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. "They're both great experiences, but PayPal is a billion-dollar outcome that today has over 100 million users and changes the world.

"You can achieve things in technology on a scale you can't in movies."

These days Sacks, a member of the so-called PayPal Mafia who went on to shape the Internet landscape with sites like Yelp and LinkedIn, is busy scaling two ventures of his own: Yammer, a social network for companies, and Geni, a genealogy website.

Last year was good to both: 5-year-old Geni became profitable. Meanwhile, Yammer, introduced in late 2008, reported 4 million users at 200,000 companies in 160 countries.

LATEST BUSINESS VIDEOS

France to sue Google and Apple for 'unfair business practices'Euronews

How has digitalisation transformed travel marketing?Euronews

The 1950s Single Mom Who Redesigned American Car InteriorsTimeline

Toys 'R' Us to Close or Sell All U.S. StoresWibbitz

Trump Says Wrong! No 'Chaos' in the White House, 'Only Great Energy'Veuer

This Is The Best Restaurant Chain in AmericaBuzz 60

Is This the End of Candy Hearts? America's 'Oldest' Candy Company Could CloseVeuer

FOX Business Beat: Airlines to collect data; Facebook to air MLB gamesFox5DC

"It was a year of growth," said Sacks, 39. "We tripled sales. The user base grew from 1.6 to 4 million. We went from 80 to 250 employees."

Sacks expects San Francisco's Yammer to continue to thrive this year, buoyed by a trend of enterprise software becoming more user friendly. That's because it needs to appeal to the end user - employees - now that the rise in cloud-based services allows such software to bypass IT departments, which traditionally made all software purchasing decisions.

"Because the software is available through the Web and doesn't need to be installed means employees can make decisions for themselves about what tools make them more productive," Sacks said. "We have finally figured out the model for getting inside the enterprise that a startup can execute."

Both Yammer and Geni, which he no longer runs directly, operate on a "freemium" model, offering some services at no charge and others requiring a paid subscription.

Yammer's goal is to make employees more productive.

"One of the ways of looking at what we're doing is we're solving a lot of Dilbert problems," he said. "Most employees in a company don't know very basic things like: Who are my co-workers? What are they working on? How do I make a contribution?"

It's not just employees from tech companies who are adopting Yammer. Corporate customers include Chevron, 7-Eleven, Tyco and Supervalu. Four out of the world's top 10 companies by revenue are using the service, Sacks said.

"It shows social is becoming much more mainstream in the enterprise," Sacks said.

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Sacks didn't grow up dreaming of being an entrepreneur. He just knew he wouldn't care for a professional occupation like his father, who was an endocrinologist.

Looking back, Sacks said, the best entrepreneurial role model was his paternal grandfather, who immigrated to southern Africa from Lithuania in the 1920s and started a candy factory.

"When I was a kid, I thought it was really cool," said Sacks, who grew up with a younger sister who did follow in their dad's footsteps and became an endocrinologist in Los Angeles.

When Sacks was 5, his family moved to Tennessee, and later to Silicon Valley, where Sacks earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Stanford.

The link between his two newest ventures - a social-networking site for the enterprise and a crowd-sourced, digital family tree - might not seem obvious. But for Sacks, it makes perfect sense.

"One of the things that makes me interested in a product is it has to be a product that the whole world can use," he said. "I tend to get excited about products that are self-distributing in some way. ... If you're dependent on a traditional sales model, to me it's just too slow."